Let’s Talk About Relationships

When the word “relationship”  comes to mind we are often prone to associate it with intimate ones, like the one we used to share with the one we love. Symbiosis is a type of relationship where living organisms live together and help each other to survive. The relationship you share with your wife/husband, boyfriend/girlfriend (whichever applies) would be the most common then the ones we share with our bloodlines. . . . parents, brothers, sisters and relatives follow.  But the term “relationship”goes farther than that more intimate than you could ever imagine. Does that mean we’re actually sleeping with someone behind our nose like we’re actually engaged to somebody aside from ones wife/husband? I would say yes, the thing is it’s more of an engagement. We sleep with it, breathe with it, bathe with it and that is something more than our life partner could do. Imagine as you maybe caught in tight embrace with your partner in prelude to the ceremonial dry run for an act of love skin to skin in contact with each other, micro-organisms, bacteria and viruses were in fact under your skin and inside both of you and an exchange of body fluids could just make such acts of passion a merry go around for these creatures to enjoy the best of both worlds.                    

Predation is a type of relationship where one organism catches the other and take it as food. Living among our fellow species, we exhibit a general symbiotic relationship but when it comes to our food intake, we generally practice predation to survive. Ironically, as some creatures may end up as food for another others my breathe life while providing some safe haven for micro-organisms to thrive. We may feel heaven while swallowing delicacies inside our mouths with bacteria clinging in it which in turn will prolong life to thrive within our bodies. In time, we will scream to hell out of our own making when some form of disease signifies its presence after the rest of the stuff we have eaten clings to our intestines after the main course had been flushed out in the toilet. Parasitism is the dreaded relationship where one organism is harmed in the benefit of the other. Ironically, this relationship is more intimate than symbiosis that your partner would be jealous about (as in the above example). So as we may find it long before the parasites inside ourselves have established a colony to secure their existence, we may live quite awhile to take things for granted. We basically become the generous host. On the grand scale however, it is amusing to realize that we had been living on this planet for quite sometime doing everything we could think of while this planet in return gains nothing from us except from the nutrients it attains from the decaying remains of our kind who have reached the limits of their physical lives. As we take everything from her surface to make for suitable stuffs to eat and build our homes, we have scoured the face of the forests and poisoned the bottoms of the ocean floor. In some and perhaps the greatest degree, we had been parasites on a living organism called Earth eating her slowly more than we could take her inside ourselves. Isn’t it a karmic consequence that as we do so, micro-organisms inside us were actually doing the same, racing towards complete domination of our physical selves giving us a fit of headache, colds, nausea, stomachache and other unnamable forms of disease? The storms, typhoons, tsunamis and climate changes speak of our reign in this planet and soon enough this whole relationships we share among our fellow organisms will be consumed into oblivion. . . . Could we call it quits?